Comments

“We gave her shelter”??? O really? “WE”? “gave“? Like hell they did. (and I believe JKR is presumably still a single mother; being a single mother =!= getting “given” anything. If she was on benefits, she was entitled to them: benefits =!= charity, which is just as well considering how much people like to police charitable giving and what the recipients should or shouldn’t do with it).

The language used here is so shitty and so questionable I’d take issue with practically every word. Probably the spaces between the words too.

I note the website of the “project” is running a mangled statement claiming to have been “hacked” – though I give that quite low credibility given the twitter account’s history of words like “bimbo”, “moron” and so on…

I deplore these comments and the people making them. It should be noted however that Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has been receiving abuse much worse than this since the independence campaign began. And a Scottish couple who won a lottery and made a contribution to the independence campaign were also subjected to vile attacks. But the media only report it when it can be used to discredit the independence movement. So although I agree that such attacks are totally without justification I am saddened that similar attacks on independence supporters, some of which have actually gone to court, receive no press coverage and unionist politicians refuse to condemn them. The misogynist floodgates have been open for a while, and the vast majority of it, as well as all of the thankfully few instances of violence, has come from the unionist side. I assume you would consider abuse directed at a female politician just as wrong as that directed at a famous writer. Why ignore one and not the other?

egrets @ 3 – yes I absolutely would. I hate it and condemn it when it’s directed at politicians I loathe such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. I haven’t intentionally ignored it on the other side; I wasn’t aware of it.

If the tweet is legit, it didn’t even get the facts straight. Rowling has also donated £10m to fund an MS clinic at Edinburgh University, Not exactly all taking and no giving. Not that that’s the issue, but it only took me half a dozen seconds to find that out.

It seems to me that single mothers are treated very differently to single fathers. Single mothers are often treated as losers who can’t find or keep a partner, who are sponging off the state and who probably only had a kid in the first place so they could get benefits and wouldn’t have to work. Single fathers are more likely to be treated as Brave Heroes who have given up everything for the sake of their children.

Most charity workers are motivated by a genuine desire to help, but there are an unfortunate minority who are motivated by narcissism. They want to be seen as superior people, providing aid to their inferiors. Receiving charity is humiliating, and they like that.

One of the things that wounds a narcissist’s inflated yet fragile ego, is an “inferior” getting uppity. JK Rowling forgot her “place” as a charity recipient, and so had to be put back in her place.

egrets @3 – death threats to Nicola Sturgeon have been reported widely in the Scottish media, and also in the UK Telegraph. It’s not surprising that Rowling gets more coverage outside Scotland, she’s much better known.

If the Tweet really did come from The Dignity Project, there is of course no excuse for it.

But while we are acknowledging that, can we also acknowledge the arrogance of a person from a dominant nation taking aggressive steps to ensure that those in a dominated nation stay firmly under the dominators’ thumb? The latter doesn’t excuse the former, but we also shouldn’t use the former as an excuse to sweep the latter under the rug.

Further to that, more than one of the pro-Union (and grossly sexist, frequently misogynistic) tabloid papers here in Scotland is making a big thing of attacks on Rowling. So, assuming it’s not a false flag operation, it’s given ammunition to the misogynist tweeter’s opponents.

A much simpler explanation is that someone forgot which Twitter account they were logged in to and posted a nasty tweet meant for their personal audience to the charity Twitter account they were responsible for. Many people seem to think that Twitter accounts for organizations and politicians are managed by the president of the organization or the politician themselves. More often than not, it is managed by the youngest, newest person on staff, because they “understand social media” and “we have to have a twitter, don’t we”?

Um…no. I can’t “acknowledge” that because I think it’s romantic horseshit. I don’t think Rowling has done anything “aggressive.” I don’t think Scotland is an oppressed colony “under the thumb” of the Sassenach. I don’t think Rowling has “taken steps” to keep anyone under anyone’s thumb.

Rowling has also made a public point of the moral rightness of rich people paying taxes, explicitly acknowledging the role public assistance played in keeping her hale at a low point.

Considering how easy it is to simply avoid taxes when you have the kind of dosh she’s now got, and that she instead stays in the UK’s ‘oppressive’ tax regime and explicitly works to encourage the well-off to shoulder their share of the burden, it seems a little harsh, perhaps, to characterize her as part of the parasitic financial class who stand to personally gain by keeping Scotland in the UK. It is possible to prefer union without being an evil colonialist oppressor, isn’t it? Or is pro-unionism somehow inherently evil?

She’s by no means perfect, but I don’t see her in any sense as a class traitor; she’s that rarest of birds, the combination of creativity and luck and how many other factors that went into making her extraordinarily wealthy. I envy her, definitely, but she didn’t get there by destroying the planet or impoverishing people, just by writing some serviceable fiction.

Rowling’s one of the good guys who never forgets she was once a single mother dependent on welfare and so has always been supportive of Labour after she made her fortune. And she didn’t just do a celebrity endorsement. She wrote a very reasoned article about her doubts about Scottish independence.

“But while we are acknowledging that, can we also acknowledge the arrogance of a person from a dominant nation taking aggressive steps to ensure that those in a dominated nation stay firmly under the dominators’ thumb? The latter doesn’t excuse the former, but we also shouldn’t use the former as an excuse to sweep the latter under the rug”

Rowling has lived in Scotland for 21 years. I know that to a Scots Nat her Englishness must always taint her – but that’s Scottish nationalism for you – and thanks for giving me yet another reason for voting a sound NO come the referendum. “Aggressive steps” – do you mean writing an article and contributing to a campaign fund? So that means any kind of campaigning in a democracy is “aggressive”.

As far as the Dignity tweet is concerned my own theory is that it’s a small organisation where everyone knows everyone else’s passwords, logins etc to the systems and so it could have been done by anyone there.

Oh – and if she had written on the Independence side – I wonder if her foreign meddling and aggression would have been condemned? I don’t wonder really. The closer we come to the referendum the more despicable the Nationalists appear.